Identifying a dionysian community in Ashkelon’s eastern cemetery

Ashkelon’s Eastern Cemetery was in continuous use for more than half a millennium, from the Hellenistic through Late Byzantine periods (fig. 1). Several excavations carried out in Ashkelon’s Eastern Cemetery reveal simple hewn graves alongside burial structures (Eisenberg-Degen 2017; Peretz 2017 and references listed there). Grave goods were found in several burials dating to the Roman period. Depositing funerary offerings was a common practice in the Roman era. Roughly a third of the excavated Eastern Cemetery (fig. 2, n=24) contained grave goods (Eisenberg-Degen 2017). Taking into account that some pilfering and plundering most likely took place, this figure is consistent with percentages noted in other Roman-period burials (Findlater et al. 2013: 69–80; Winter 2015: 82–87).